What’s in a name

Yet again I have managed to find another displacement activity – just when I thought I was finally concentrating properly on revision. The thing that has got me interested this time is Blogging. Ah ha! you might think – blogging about blogging (meta-blogging) – what an interesting way to while away these precious hours.

In fact its a good deal more mundane than that. I realised the other day that my entries on this blog are going to be diminishing soon. I’m taking a year or so out from studying with the OU and so my contributions to my OU blog are bound to be few and infrequent.

But I do quite like blogging so I thought I would set up a new blog to write about programming, programming paradigms, tools, techniques, and so on. [Ed: yawn…if you must]. So I came up with a list of what I thought were good names for a blog – and for each one I found that the name was already in use. But here’s the rub, I thought I would visit each of these blogs to see what they were like, and every one of them, except one, had been registered 6 to 8 years ago and hardly ever used since. One of them, created by a Professor at a notable US university, stated in its introduction all the good and useful things that he was going to write about – and then wrote nothing, not one single entry. I’m sure he’s forgotten all about it. But he still has the name registered. Another one that I found had been created in 2000. The blogger had helpfully added in his first entry that he was too tired to be bothered to write anything and was going to bed. I can only assume that he never woke up.

So, many of the good blog names have been taken and that’s it. Of course, if I was really intelligent I should put my mind to good use by being creative and inventive and coming up with some even better alternative names, but really, I’m too tired and I’m going to bed.